upon her face." Dreiser's confusion is surely as great as Clyde's. The more one reads, the more convinced one becomes that Dreiser's bouts of agonized incom- petence and syntactical distress were produced by splits that lay hidden deep in his nature and in his beliefs D reiser's early life was marked by high ambition and great difficulty He was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1871, the twelfth of thirteen chil- dren. His father was a German-born mill foreman who slowly and painfully fell to the position of night watchman; his mother could read but not write. (Dreiser taught her how, when he was twelve.) A fervent Catholic, Dreiser's fa- ther never stopped preaching rectitude and self-control to his children, but his guidance was of little practical help. One of Dreiser's brothers changed his name to Paul Dresser and became a suc- cessful New York songwriter, but some of his siblings had a harder time in life. Dreiser's ne'er-do-well brother Rome would put on his best clothes and lounge around a Terre Haute hotel as if he had just eaten dinner there-a mixture of illusion and despair that seems to prefig- ure behavior in ' American Tragedy:" Dreiser spent a year at Indiana Uni- versity, then knocked around as a news- paperman in St. Louis, Chicago, and New York. His startling first novel, "Sis- ter Carrie" (1900), was recommended to Doubleday, Page by Frank Norris, but the publisher, after signing a contract with Dreiser, nearly buried the book, which it considered immoral. "Sister Carrie" failed commercially, but Dreiser continued to publish long, serious nov- els, including "Jennie Gerhardt" (1911) and "The Financier" (1912), and some of the right readers found their way to him. In 1916, Sherwood Anderson wrote that Dreiser's "brutal heavy feet" had opened a path for realism and sexual candor-the path that Anderson him- self wanted to tread. But when Dreiser started out he had no path to follow. He was deaf to what Emerson, Twain, and James might have suggested of a distinctive American style, and his youthful reading of Balzac, Hardy, and Huxley, Darwin's great defender, how- ever nourishing to the task of natural- ism, yielded little that was useful to his sense of the unshaped reality of Amer- 180 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21 & 28, 2003 ican life. And yet he knew that the ma- terials of fiction were there. Through what lens would he view them? Dreiser armed himself for the task of writing ' American Tragedy" by consulting the psychoanalyst A. A. Brill on crimi- nal behavior; he read Dostoyevsky and Freud; he secured a reading room at the New York Public Library and absorbed as much as he could of chemistry and physics. But he did not fully assimilate what he read; as he educated himse his style grew thicker and more unwieldy: By the time he wrote the novel, the di- visions that threw his prose into flail- ing disorder had hardened and become explicit. T he germ of the novel was a news- paper story from 1906: A young man, Chester E. Gillette, was convicted of drowning a pregnant girl in upstate New York. Two years later, Gillette was executed in the electric chair. Dreiser clipped newspaper accounts of the case and brooded over it for years. He made false starts on the book while he was working on other fiction, and he tried to write about different real-life mur- ders, but he eventually returned to Gil- lette. The poverty of the newspaper ac- counts must have stirred him. Late in the novel, the newspaper coverage of the fictionalized version is referred to as "a crime sensation of the first magni- tude, with all those intriguingly colorful, and yet morally and spiritually atro- cious, elements-love, romance, wealth, poverty; death." In other words, melo- drama and banality: The greatness of ' American Tragedy" is that Dreiser took this crime sensation and dissolved the violent but meaningless frame of the story into its innumerable constitu- ent episodes: the social condition of murderer and victim and friends; the moments of obsession, doubt, and rage; the slowly forming moral hardness; the evasions, the hundred hesitations and velleities; the acts rejected as well as those committed. No such story is truly banal, Dreiser seems to be saying; there is only inadequate representation of what happened. As Dreiser re-creates it, the crime grows out of a collision between the mental and spiritual poverty of the lower middle class and the moral pov- erty of the rich. Clyde Griffiths, the fic- tionalized Chester Gillette, is the prod- uct of a social group that has, so to speak, no myth, no history to draw on, no imagination of itselE Clyde's mother and father, in an echo of Dreiser's own upbringing, are shabby hymn singers and sidewalk preachers in Kansas City; they stand on street corners, hawking a thin, rote piety, attended by their re- sentful children, including the twelve- year-old Clyde, who wishes he were elsewhere and dreams of everything he doesn't have. His parents, indifferent to human desire and to the nuances of sin and goodness, offer nothing that connects to the needs of a teen-age boy. At sixteen, he escapes and becomes a bellboy at a luxurious hotel. He falls in with the other bellboys, a mang)T, imp- ish lot, and the local shopgirls, includ- ing Hortense, a tease who plays with him so ski11fu1ly that he nearly faints with longing and fear. At the end of a drunken revel in the woods, Clyde and his friends, driving a borrowed car, acci- dentally run over a little girl, and Clyde crawls away in the snow and disappears from Kansas City: Who is this boy? He is slender and handsome, with a high white forehead and dark wavy hair and soft eyes; he has fine, beautiful hands. He desperately wants sex and love, but he's not sure enough of himself to demand it-he's a compound of need and hesitation that women find appealing. In his manner, there's a nervous alertness that Mont- gomery Clift, in the George Stevens movie version of the book, "A Place in the Sun" (1951), captured well: a sensi- tivity without intelligence; an avidity without shrewdness. Clyde has no ideas, no specific curiosity, no consciousness to speak of. He wants to get ahead by pleasing people wealthier and more powerful than he is. Secretly, and then not so secretly, he hopes to join them in what he takes to be an endless exercise of freedom. Wealth is the only tran- scendence he can imagine. A shallow, sensual American boy, then, wholly de- fined by desire, and too dazzled and jan-